Last summer, you may recall, I was looking for sunscreen that wouldn't burn if it got in my eyes. I found two kinds that promised no tears at the drugstore around the corner — one for babies, the other for kids, both the same brand. But which should I buy? Was one stronger? Was one gentler? I checked the ingredient lists, which turned out to be identical: The same ingredients listed in the same order. Hmmmm, I thought.

Several weeks later I was back, this time looking for Pantene hair conditioner. There'd been a zillion ads for it over the summer, and my hair had been looking brittle, dull, dry, frizzy and generally awful.

But which Pantene conditioner? Smooth & Sleek? Moisture Renewal? Split-End Prevention? Hydrating Curls? Always Smooth? Ice Shine? Restoratives Frizz Control? Restoratives Breakage Defense? Restoratives Time Renewal? Full & Thick? Sheer Volume? Beautiful Lengths? Moisture Balance? Smooth Vitality?

I stood there paralyzed by the abundance of choice. I wanted all those good things!

My hair cried out for a product that would deliver shine and volume and vitality, smooth out frizz and fix dryness, prevent breakage and split ends, encourage bounce and swing and, while it was at it, infuse my hair with the shimmering come-hither gorgeousness of the hair in the magazine ads. Flummoxed by all the choices, I started reading ingredients to see if I could tell which formula was most likely to work miracles. I couldn't, of course. Cyclopentasiloxane? Stearamidopropyl dimethylamine?

But I did notice that many of these conditioners seemed to have mostly the same ingredients, in more or less the same order. Hmmmm...

(Not to mention that the No. 1 ingredient in each one was water. Pantene conditioners sell for between $5 and $9, depending on size, which is relatively inexpensive. Still, 40 cents an ounce is a lot to pay for plain old water.)

I must've stood there dithering in the hair care aisle for 15 minutes or so before I gave up and went home empty-handed.

I sought professional help. I confided in the Personalized Product Finder at Pantene.com about the heartbreak of ungovernable frizz, split ends, dullness, dryness, etc., and began to feel I was getting somewhere. But then it pressed me to say which problem was the worst. Unsure, I tried first one answer, then another. If I said frizz was the worst problem, it prescribed Pro-V Restoratives Frizz Control. If I said dryness, it recommended Moisture Renewal, and so on. I could've figured that much out for myself.

Why was this so hard? With 8 zillion choices, why couldn't I find The One — the conditioner that would best condition my incorrigible hair? It had to exist, didn't it? Why else would hair care companies go to the trouble of making so many?

I asked experts. Was it a trick? Were these companies putting essentially the same goop in all these different bottles just to make me think they cared about my own personal hair trauma?

No way, Pantene spokesperson Katelyn O'Rourke assured me by e-mail: "Our products are targeted to help each specific hair type and are not part of a marketing scheme." She sent along a message from Procter & Gamble scientist Teca Gillespie, who made the point that, while some ingredients showed up in most of Pantene's conditioners, "what you can't see are the levels and ratios."

She compared it to cooking: With the same ingredients -- eggs, sugar, milk, cream, vanilla -- "you can make custard or eggnog. In Pantene we have optimized each formula with the correct ingredient ratios to give you the benefit that is listed on the bottle."

Dr. Edward Tauber of Brand Extension Research agreed that some line extensions — adding new variants within a product line — are legitimate, "but most of it is done to command greater shelf impact."

Shelf impact?

If you want enough shelf space at the local drugstore to be able to line up 15 bottles of Pantene hair conditioner facing the aisle, he explained, you create 15 different versions of it.

E-mailing from Russia, David Reibstein, a professor of marketing at Penn's Wharton School, made essentially the same point: Companies make many slightly different formulations of the same product to occupy more shelf space because having more shelf space increases the chances that a shopper will choose your product.

In his book "Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society," Karl Ulrich, another Wharton professor, explains it this way:

"Shopping can be a cognitively challenging task. When faced with a shelf of toothpaste options, few consumers will carefully evaluate each alternative ... so almost anything on the shelf will garner some sales. In fact, holding all other factors constant, sales volume is remarkably proportional to the shelf space allocated to the product."

He offers the example of a drugstore shelf with two brands of toothpaste, Colgate and Crest, each with half the shelf space. If Crest adds a "new, improved" Minty Crest formula to the mix, Crest will capture two-thirds of the shelf space and, all other things equal, two-thirds of the sales. The inevitable result, he suggests, is an "arms race" of product variety as every brand strives to occupy more territory on the shelf. Ulrich notes that Crest now comes in "about 100 different formulations."

In other words, I spent 15 minutes dithering in the hair care aisle, speculating on the utility of cyclopentasiloxane, stearamidopropyl dimethylamine and behentrimonium chloride, purely so Procter & Gamble could wrest a few extra inches of shelf space away from the CVS store brands and colonize it with Pantene, all to increase the likelihood that its 2009 annual report will trumpet an extra .00003 percent increase in Pantene market share? My lost quarter hour, now gone and utterly irretrievable, was mere collateral damage in a pitched battle fought by faceless giant corporations?

O Capitalism, you have much to answer for!

Write to Patricia McLaughlin c/o Universal Uclick, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106 or patsy.mcl@verizon.net.